Central America: Aiming To Gain Ground

• Share

Talk of peace, as the fighting goes on and on.

As the crowd gathered in the columned halls of the presidential palace in Bogotá, Colombia, to await the outcome of the second face-to-face meeting between representatives of El Salvador's warring factions, rumors spread that the talks were on the verge of collapse. So when delegates from the Salvadoran Peace Commission and from the five-faction guerrilla movement that opposes the government emerged from the negotiating chamber nearly 3 ½ hours later, the sense of relief was almost palpable. "The door is open for future meetings," said a smiling Colombian President Belisario Betancur as he posed with the seven Salvadorans. "The dialogue for peace in El Salvador has been directly initiated." But when asked to give a thumbs-up, thumbs-down verdict on the session, Peace Commission President Francisco Quiñónez evasively thrust his thumb sideways. Later, he described the meeting as "a total disappointment."

The Bogotá talks produced little progress in ending El Salvador's four-year-old civil war. Representing the provisional government of President Alvaro Magaña, the Peace Commission insisted that the insurgents take part in the national elections that are scheduled for early next year. The guerrillas, however, were still holding out for a settlement in which they would be given a share of power before having to participate in any elections. They also demanded that future meetings be held in El Salvador, a move that would give them added legitimacy. The leftist coalition predicted that talks would continue despite the present impasse, but Peace Commission members seemed to be pessimistic about the future of negotiations.

There were other reminders last week of how intractable the problems are in a region whose troubles seemed to be momentarily forgotten as the Korean Air Lines disaster and the war in Lebanon captured world attention. In both El Salvador and Nicaragua, guerrillas engaged government troops in some of the most intense fighting in months. In El Salvador, the U.S. supports the government, while in Marxist-led Nicaragua the U.S. has, through the CIA, helped finance the insurgents. To no one's surprise, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, 37, coordinator of Nicaragua's ruling junta, lashed out at the U.S. during his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York City last week, charging that the Reagan Administration had "declared war on the people of Nicaragua." He claimed that U.S.-backed contras (counterrevolutionaries) had killed 717 Nicaraguans and caused economic damage totaling $108.5 million since 1981. The U.S., said Ortega, was pursuing "the policy of the big stick, the policy of gunboats, the policy of terror." The Sandinista leader warned later that Nicaragua was prepared to go "everywhere" (including, implicitly, the Soviet Union) to procure the combat aircraft it needs to check the contras. The state of conflict in each country: